1. Field
Embodiments relate to point-in-time backups via a storage controller to an object storage cloud.
2. Background
Cloud storage is a model of data storage in which digital data is stored in logical pools, and the physical storage spans a plurality of servers. The physical storage environment may be owned and managed by a hosting company. These cloud storage providers may be responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and for keeping the physical environment protected and maintained properly. People and organizations may buy or lease storage capacity from the cloud storage providers to store user, organization, or application data.
In certain computing environments, a storage controller allows host computing systems to perform input/output (I/O) operations with a plurality of storage devices controlled by the storage controller. A storage management application that executes in the storage controller may manage the plurality of storage devices, such as disk drives, tape drives, flash drives, direct access storage devices (DASD), etc., that are coupled to the storage controller. A host application that executes in a host computing system may transmit I/O commands to the storage controller and the storage controller may execute the I/O commands to read data from the storage devices or write data to the storage devices.
A point-in-time copy is a fully usable copy of a defined collection of data that includes an image of the data as it appeared at a single point-in-time. The point-in-time copy is considered to have logically occurred at the single point-in-time, but certain mechanisms may perform part or all of the copy at other times, as long as the result is a consistent copy of the data as it appeared at the single point-in-time, Prior to the use of point-in-time copy operations, in order to create a consistent copy of the data, a host application had to be stopped while the data was being physically copied. For large datasets, this caused stoppages of several hours, and made the process of making copies of large datasets very inconvenient for users. Point-in-time copy operations allow a copy to be created with almost no impact on the host application. Except for a brief period of a few milliseconds or seconds while the point-in-time copy is established, the host application can continue running. For example FlashCopy* supported by International Business Machines (IBM) is a point-in-time copy mechanism that makes it possible to create, nearly instantaneously, point-in-time snapshot copies of entire logical volumes or data sets. * IBM, zSeries, pSeries, xSeries, BladeCenter, WebSphere, and DB2, FlashCopy are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.